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Time wasted without the metric system

When I talk to people about a future where we switch over to the metric system, many bemoan how difficult the change would be. The problem with that perspective is that most people have no idea how much of our time is wasted due to our using U.S. customary units. I’m highly confident that after a few months of using just metric units, our response would be: “What were we thinking? Why didn’t we do this ages ago?”

Ounces made it into two top 10 questions for recent Google searches.

Just last week I came across an infographic titled “10 Most Asked Questions on Google.” It included queries searched for during a previous six-month period and was global in nature. The graphic belies the assertion that Americans understand their current system (“So why go from something we know to something we don’t know?” they ask me). Bottom line: Because questions eight and 10 are about how many ounces there are in a cup and a pound (respectively) so we really don’t know our units, despite what we say. (Money amounts refer to the cost of ads on the answer landing pages.)

Between the two of them, they accounted for 900,000 questions in that six month time frame. So how does that play out? Let’s say you’re working in the kitchen and you decide you want to scale a recipe up or down and need that “How many ounces in a …?” question answered. The first thing I’d do is search my memory bank to see if that was something I already knew. Then, if I didn’t know, or was less than confident in my answer, I’d need to either whip out my phone or mosey over to my computer to get the answer.

While the actual Google search might seem almost instantaneous, the process of getting to enter the question is not. Let’s say that it takes about 90 seconds before you get to the Google search part (I have nothing to back this assertion up but it is probably conservative). If so, that means we (and by “we” I mean either Americans or the poor souls who find themselves confronted with our crazy units here or elsewhere in the world) spend 45,000 hours each year searching for this information. Put another way, every year we spend more than five years of our time reminding ourselves how many ounces there are in things.

This amount of time, of course, doesn’t include all the time spent looking such information up in a cookbook only to discover (in most cases) that conversions between metric units are sometimes included but not how many ounces, for instance, there are in things.

Most cookbooks include units between U.S. customary and metric system, not within customary units.

I can’t confidently promise that we’d likely spend any saved time on something productive but at least we’d have the opportunity to spend it on something less wasteful.

Confusion in the kitchen

Our units make scaling ingredients very difficult

As if that wasn’t bad enough, I also recently came across the cheat sheet on the right.

It’s just nuts that we put ourselves through these machinations when using the metric system is so easy. Unless you’re really slow, you wouldn’t even need such a chart.

Given that we already use decimalized currency, most everyone could immediately tell you that half a dollar is 50 cents and a quarter of a dollar is 25 cents without a calculator or a Google search. It’s the same with metric system mesures.

While it might take some thought and effort to switch over to the metric system initially, once there, our lives become a whole lot simpler.

2 thoughts on “Time wasted without the metric system”

Cooking is only one example of this probem. Doing carpentry and adding up lengths in eighths of an inch or less is another, and the Metric Maven wrote a whole blog entry on the difficulties of American drill bits with sizes designated by numbers and letters to suit various sizes of fasteners and another series in 64ths of an inch.